Marie Arana's first novel, "Cellophane," could take a prize for most jam-packed prologue, even judged against breakneck openers by Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, her clear forbears. Arana, editor of the Washington Post's Book World, may divide her time between D.C. and Lima, Peru, but she draws upon both the color and the literary traditions of Latin America with perfect fluency. Like Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude," "Cellophane" begins with a vision of our protagonist's death: "in a bustling metropolis, surrounded by doting women, far from his paper, the trees, and the rush of a great, dark river." As surely as paper disintegrates to pulp, this exuberant and virtuosic novel will circle around to that alienated ending. But first, in the space of 12 pages, she gives us nearly a whole life.

Don Victor Sobrevilla has two equal loves: engineering and paper. In quick succession, he also acquires a wife, three children, and -- after a series of troubled births attended by both priests and witchmen -- an ecumenical outlook toward the natives' magical beliefs and the Peruvian gentry's Catholic faith. Fascinated since boyhood by a poster of Gustave Eiffel's "Iron House" deep in the Amazon rain forest, he moves his family far up the river to the untamed Ucayali region, where he builds a bustling paper factory. The awed Indians-turned-workers call him "the shapechanger."

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The story proper picks up in 1952, just as Don Victor discovers a formula for newfangled cellophane. The residents of tiny Floralinda are bewitched, either literally or figuratively, by the film's shiny transparency. Suddenly everyone is blurting their most candid thoughts, with consequences that are first funny, then erotic and finally disastrous.

Arana, whose 2001 memoir "American Chica" was a finalist for the National Book Award, visits her "plague of truth" upon a rich and ribald cast. Don Victor is a bit of a dirty old man who still regards his pious wife, Doña Mariana, with as much passion as his whores. The inhabitants of his family hacienda are as lovable as they are high-strung. The eldest, Belén, is a bookworm in a sexless marriage; sister Graciela is nicknamed La Bella Morada for the permanently purple eyes inflicted by her violent, banished husband. Elsa, the wife of Don Victor's only son, Jaime, is the book's most deliciously prickly presence, a lily-white descendant of sugar barons who dreams of escaping to civilization with a swashbuckling general. These sketches don't cover even half of the novel's quickly rendered, yet full-blooded central characters, from a foulmouthed Aussie wayfarer to a surprisingly sensual schoolteacher. The book switches rapidly among their episodes, flowing as swiftly and surely as the Amazon itself.

But more impressive than how Arana weaves her characters is the way she entwines their concerns. Conflict takes on a teeming array of forms in "Cellophane": whites versus natives, religion versus magic, feudalism versus revolution. It's a vision of the rain forest as a place where every strain of human drama grows as tangled as the encroaching vines -- and in depicting this, Arana has wound her themes together with an energetic, subtly controlled wildness.

Some details in this teeming tapestry never quite earn their keep: a "striking deformation" on Doña Mariana's arm doesn't come to have any significance, and an allegory about a tree cracking the roof of a cathedral unnecessarily pounds home lessons to come. But then, the tradition Arana is working in is one of ebullient inclusion rather than careful paring. Then, too, Don Victor's familial backstory is a bit clunkily dispatched -- not that you will notice after the cellophane makes its appearance and the story speeds on its way.

More interesting to consider is Arana's tone, which is fleet and farcical even as the plotline turns violent. Totalitarian coups are roiling in the distant cities of Trujillo and Lima, and even wacky Floralinda will not long be safe from them, yet the arrival of a corrupt military unfolds with little more gravity than the other silly misunderstandings that converge to threaten Don Victor's authority. Perhaps it is a fitting lampooning of the ludicrous abuses of power, or perhaps Arana depicts revolution with a lightness of touch only someone a generation removed from the violence could.

In the end, it's impossible to separate the military and spiritual forces behind Don Victor's undoing, though one lesson is clear: Truth is not always as transparent as the shiny wrapping paper Don Victor glorifies. Fate seems more like a gentle rasp on the hand than a dark force as "the shapechanger" sails toward his exile. And a joyously comic sensibility triumphs as the reader closes the pages to bask in the warmheartedness of this sunny and delightful tale.